Share this

Guardian editor Katharine Viner has warned that social media giants like Facebook have become “overwhelmingly powerful” and “a real concern for the news industry”.

Speaking at an advertising industry lunch in London she also said she is not “theologically opposed to paywalls”, but would like to try other alternatives first.

Guardian News and Media is currently seeking to curb annual operating losses which have escalated from £30.4m to 2014/2015 to £53.6m for the year to the end of March 2016.

The increase in losses is thought to be at least partly due to the fact that internet giants like Google and Facebook now dominate the advertising market and have taken huge amounts of revenue away from publishers.

GNM is looking to cut £54m from its annual operating costs and is currently reviewing its business model. The company has said that charging for some online content is one of the options under consideration.

Survey data from the Reuters Institute Digital News report, published last month, found that social media has overtaken print as a source of news in the UK and that Facebook is by far the most popular social network.

Facebook has become the major source of traffic for many news websites, overtaking Google search in terms of importance.

In comments reported by Digiday, Viner said: “Social media companies have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read and whether publishers make any money.

“The idea of challenging the wide-open worldwide web has been replaced by platforms and publishers who maximize the amount of time you spend with them and find clever ways to stop you leaving. That may be great news for advertisers and the platforms themselves, but it’s a real concern for the news industry.”
She also reportedly said: “For journalism, it is a fight dictated by an ever-changing, unknown, mysterious news feed algorithm.”

Hey, Here you will be able to know about how you can payday loans online without credit check so you may move to the portal we are going to share with you can have one of the guidelines for the same and can easily do so.